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icy cold Sri Lankan theatre
Monday, June 30 2025
location: room 3023, Galle Face Hotel, Colombo, Sri Lanka
When she awoke this morning, Gretchen was not feeling good. She had me get her some bread or whatever while I was in the Long Room having breakfast. I was a little off my feed as well, and wanted to avoid the most Sri Lankan of dishes (particularly the dahl, which had an unsettling blandness about it).
Later Gretchen managed to rally in time for the morning's big activity, which was to walk to a nearby shopping mall (the Galle Face Mall, which was different from the one where we ate dinner in food court some nights before) to see some student films in a theatre in the big cineplex. The Galle Face Mall seemed even fancier than that other one, and it had something like seven levels, all of them reachable via escalator. The cineplex was on the topmost floor, and the air conditioning grew colder and colder the further into the cineplex we got. The theatre where we'd be watching the films temperatures that were probably in the mid 50s, which must seem like an extravagant luxury in Sri Lanka but to anyone with a reasonable expectation for indoor conditions it seemed insane. Another luxurious thing about the theatre was the huge seats with power controls to make them assume just about any shape. Gretchen and I quickly turned ours into beds and then used blankets that were handled out to provide a buffer for the icy air. At some point I discovered that the arm wrest between our two chairs could be pushed out of the way, making something of a double bed. That's probably how a lot of upper-class babies get made in Colombo.
As for the movies, they looked to be fairly normal student projects, the kind that could benefit from a little editing. One was about an older woman with a typically Sri Lankan Buddhism (that is, inclined towards ritual for superstitious reasons). Then there was another film about a young woman who worked for a time in a factory in Jordan under extremely exploitative conditions. She never ended up with the promised visa, which caused all sorts of problems. Ultimately she had to return to Sri Lanka.
By the end of that second film, Gretchen wanted to leave, and I was happy to go too. So we went up out of the theatre and Jiva (who handles such low-level emergencies) hailed a tuk tuk and rode with us back to the hotel.
Gretchen and I spent the rest of the afternoon in our hotel room. She was feeling weak and parts of her body had low-level aches, as though she had come down with the flu. As for me, my face was aching and I'd felt like I was coming down with a cold at least since getting into that smelly bus yesterday. We ended up getting a good amount of sleep.
This evening, though, I was feeling good enough to go to a special traditional dinner behind held at some restaurant that is either vegan or very vegan-friendly. Gretchen was still feeling ill (as were several others in our group, including possibly Gretchen's mother), so she stayed behind.
Fortunately the stinky bus had been replaced with one that didn't stink. I rode up near the front near Gretchen's father and we talked at some length about artificial intelligence, a subject that clearly interests him but one that he probably has trouble finding others familiar enough with it to want to talk about it. He had some app on his phone that supposedly did something AIish to photographs, but everything he showed me just looked like the ordinary product of a camera.
At the restaurant, the people in our entourage were herded into a back room, where a long table had been prepared with individual place settings that consisted of low baskets topped with a single lotus leaf (lotus being an aquatic plant with a flat, weakly-veined leaf resembling a lily pad). There were also bowls full of various rices and curries spread out. After we sat down, we were told we would be eating this meal in the traditional Sri Lankan way, which was with our hands, without the use of utensils. This was a bit of a culture shock for me, since I would never imagine eating something as messy as rice and a curry with just my fingers. (Gretchen's father opted out right away, asking for a fork. He used the excuse that he is left-handed, which makes eating with his hands an especially problematic mess.) But I was in Sri Lanka, so I did as Sri Lankans do. I actually found that my right hand didn't get as messy as expected. Something about the rice helped cleanse my fingertips. But there is no way I would eat this way if I had access to a fork. I joked to Gretchen's father at some point that it would be great to have some injera. (Eating with the hands is no problem when eating with injera, a non-messy material that acts as a buffer between the glurpy wats and the fingertipes.)
The food wasn't anything special, though there were some fun dishes included that I went back to for seconds, including batter-fried banana flowers (batter-fried anything is a reliable winner!) and bowl of oyster mushrooms. At the end of the meal, several desserts came out that I had no interest in, though we got to-go boxes, so I got some brownies and batter-fried banana flowers to toake home.
Back at the hotel, a conversation with Jiva led to some toasted bread coming up from the kitchen for Gretchen. She definitely seemed better this evening.
The table the way it was set up for our lotus-leaf dinner tonight. Click to enlarge.
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